Browsing Posts tagged Paul Ryan

— Our thanks to Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, for permission to republish this post, which originally appeared on his blog Animals & Politics on October 31, 2012.

In February, a photo of Dan Richards, president of the California Fish and Game Commission, began circulating on the Internet: Richards gleefully posed in a trophy picture with a dead mountain lion he had killed on a guided hound hunt in Idaho.

Cougar hunting is legal in Idaho, but California voters banned the practice in 1990 and reaffirmed the prohibition with a second statewide vote in 1996. The picture and comments by Richards dismissing the wishes of voters offended a lot of Californians, and seemed especially callous and tone-deaf given that Richards was supposed to represent the values of Californians on wildlife protection issues.

The grisly photo triggered a backlash that played out over weeks and months. In the end, Richards lost his post as president of the Fish and Game Commission, and the legislature passed AB 2609 to improve the transparency and accountability of the state agency. The biggest takeaway, however, was that the state legislature passed SB 1221 to ban the hound hunting of bears and bobcats.

This had long been unfinished business for the humane movement, as a number of states over the past decades have banned the unsporting and inhumane use of packs of radio-collared dogs to chase bears into trees, so that a trophy hunter can follow the radio signal on a handheld telemetry device and shoot the frightened animal at point-blank range off a tree branch. Richards’ photo put the hounding issue back into the public consciousness, and then HSLF and HSUS pushed it ahead in a tough battle in the legislature, with the NRA, U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, and other hunting groups fighting it every step of the way. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.